The 1950s and 1960s and the American Woman: the transition from PDF

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The 1950s and 1960s and the American Woman: the transition from

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Introduction 1

1. The American woman in the 1950's: from the

"ideal woman" to the "woman in crisis" 5

1.1. The American Way of Life" and women in the 1950's 5

Building the ideology of the "ideal woman" as "housewife" 17 The identity crisis of the housewife in the late 1950's: looking for a

2. The search for a new feminine ideal in the 1960's, from the newly emancipated

American woman to the feminist 46

2.1. "There's something missing": from women's individual crises to the collective

awareness of their common condition 46

2.2. The revival of a Movement and the development of Egalitarian Feminism 50

2.3. The Egalitarian Feminist Revolution 59

2.4. The rise of Radicalism: "Women's Lib" 62

2.5. The Radical Feminist Revolution 76

2.6. Radicalism: The instruments and ideologies of action 80

Conclusion: how the experience of American women in the 1950's and 1960's

contributed to modern women's emancipation 85

References 91

Appendices 94

Introduction

"Have dinner ready, prepare yourself, prepare the children, minimize all noise, be happy to see him, listen to him, make the evening his", here is what young women learned at school in the 1950's in America. Thanks to "Home Economics High School Text Book" of 1954 (1), it was possible to discover how to be an ideal housewife, the woman for whom the maintenance of the house and the well-being of the family were fundamental priorities. The analysis of this post World War II society, founded on the "American Way of Life", its influence on the condition of women and the questioning of this social model, constitute the basis of this study. The American society in the 1950's was mainly founded on the ideology of the housewife, shaped by magazines and other media targeted to women. The questioning of this idealistic view of women and the transformation of these housewives into committed feminists at the end of the 1950's will form the central subject of the research. After the Second World War, marriage was the main goal for girls; family life was their major aspiration, and the manifestation of a "perfect" existence. However, the dissatisfaction that women started to feel at the end of the 1950's became a national issue, summarized in the catch phrase "There is something missing", deeply felt by a great many women. Maintain the house, prepare meals, take care of the children, help them with their homework, be the ideal wife, do the dishes and the laundry while remaining elegant; that made the day of most American women in the 1950's. Gradually a feeling of insufficiency appeared: "Is that all there is to life?" The main topic of this dissertation is to show that the evolution of this feeling toward a true claiming fight for women's rights made the 1950's one key period for female emancipation. As a historian, I have always been interested in this period, more particularly in its remarkable social and domestic esthetics and the duality between the eternal search for one "perfect life" and the reality of these women, many of whom lead a lonely and 2

1950's, is that they did not have the choice. Their future was already defined: going to

university to prepare for marriage or rather to while away their time, (especially between white middle-class women) meeting with a boy that would suit their family, The Feminine Mystique, is the main source of information on the condition of these housewives. Transparent testimonies give us an extremely clear vision of how women lived this illusion of a "perfect life" at the time. 3 The interest of this research is to break the idea of the 1950's as a period of glory, as "the golden days", when American society was organized in such a way that women were supposed to be perfectly and undeniably happy. The revelation of the true face of this culture is valid and important not only for historical reasons, but especially to understand the American woman of the time. Thanks to this feminine struggle, we, modern women, can choose between a family life and a professional life or choose to have both: to be a mother and a career woman at the same time. They showed that it is possible to work and have a family, that women are not obliged to choose between professional realization and personal fulfillment. Before the 1950's, women faced a dilemma: have a profession and a solitary life or have a family life by leaving aside their career ambitions. It is thanks to the 1950's women that today I can study for a future career and, at the same time, dream of a family life. This new way of life established at the time in the United States, the "American Way of Life", and its influence on women, the construction of the ideology of the housewife and the crises of this ideology are the main points that will be developed in the first part of this work. The second part integrates the transformation of these women into committed feminists and their evolution until the revival of feminine activism in the

1960's and 1970's. With Simone de Beauvoir, we understand the importance of this

long fight undertaken by women to become free and independent: "We are not born woman, we become it" (De Beauvoir 1948: 102). 4 Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become

Friedan, Betty. 1997. The Feminine Mystique.

1. The American woman in the 1950's: from the "ideal woman" to the woman in

1.1. "The American Way of Life" and women

Before the 1950's, America suffered from almost twenty years of stagnation, caused by 6 that offered mutual help and support. Brett Harvey points out this feeling of community . (Harvey, 2002: (Harvey, 2002: 113) business leaders saw an opportunity to develop their activities. 7 Stores, malls and huge parking lots were installed on roads, therefore democratizing

1.1.1. The Consumer Society

The demonstration of the public's desire and ability to buy new products was the (Kammen, 1999: 137) 8 The economy opened up and the way of life of the population reflected this. These If there was no serious culture, if balm was everywhere in the land, if everyman might happily (Lhamon, 1998: 3)

Rebel without a Cause, the music of Elvis

On the Road were not rare cultural expressions of a 9 comics and theme parks. Instead of producing and participating in their own lore, fifties people 10 the research for possible communists among Americans citizens, the FBI destroyed

1.1.2. Family Life and the Work World

In reality American social culture at the time was entirely based on the family. In that if they were going to get married, but when and to whom? Young women how many babies they would 11 and difficulties young people were trying to rebuild a normal life and wanted to 12 According to them, the patriotic duty of women was to give men their place back in the American Women in the 1950's: Mothers and More, E. Kaledin analyzes 13 I attempt to catalog the many ways women with some choice managed, in Gerda Lerner's words, Ladies' Home Journal's slogan during the decade was "Never Underestimate the 14 Margaret Chase Smith and Lillian Hellman struggled against McCarthyism; artists like 15

30 percent in 1960". Since the majority of these women were part-time workers, this

16 After the Second World War, women's capacities and opportunities were increasingly 1 The idea that work was something for women to "fall back on" was extremely (Harvey, 2002: 139) 1 New York Times, 7 December 1958; Mead, New York Times, 16 November 1956. 17 When millions of women were forced to leave the work force after the war they didn't

1.2. Building the ideology of the "ideal woman" as "housewife"

The desire to have a "perfect" family was shared by most women, in the 1950's as 18 the laundry in the most modern washing machine and cleaning the house with her

1.2.1. Women's Magazines and Advertisements

According to Nancy A. Walker the feminine magazines of the time dealt with domestic 19 Thus Vogue primarily addressed fashion and upper-class social interaction, whereas Good an article on ''increasing baldness in women" a poem named "A boy is a boy" the history ofa girl who meets the man of her life a story on a young married couple who sleeps in separate rooms after a an article on how to defeat the complex of inferiority six pages of fashion pictures four pages on how to have the same physical shape as supermodels an article on how to find a second husband an article on easy ways to make a successful barbecue 20 While one of the functions of the women's magazines was always to provide Ladies Home Journal published an article about the

Woman's Home Companion

included an article about the major issues of that year's presidential campaign. by psychologists, recipes for dinner parties and decoration tips. Rather than

Journal, the editor, Barton W.

now women had the time to Delineator magazine, home economist Grace L. Pennock declared that

Ladies' Home

included the passage: "At least women are free to make their own decisions 21
Whereas in the 1940's and 1950's advertisements for household products tented to Woman's Home Companion by a drawing of a simple bowl of hot Companion shows a women driving a four-door sedan as the neighbors look on 22
in the magazines during the 1950's originated during the earlier decades of the twentieth . (Hartmann, 1982: 189) However, what really marks the difference between feminine magazines of the early decades and of the midcentury decades was the development of a national culture on a scale unprecedented in American History. Consumerism changed the lifestyle and the mentality of the nation; electronic media, along with household products, frozen and canned food played perhaps the largest role in this development, as millions of people 23
saw the same films and the same TV series, prepared the same recipes and cleaned their houses with the same products. Roland Marchand in Visions of Classlessness, Quests for Dominion points to the decline of foreign-language publications and to the increase of homogeneity in clothing and in items like furniture, as Sears and Roebuck ceased publishing regional catalogs to develop a national mass production system. In Where the Girls Are, media expert Susan J. Douglas writes both as a scholar on American Media and as a young woman who lived during the postwar period and who was conscious of its impact on her: My point is that this situation intensified with the particular array of media technology and outlets that interlocked in people's homes after World War II. It wasn't simply the sheer size and ubiquity of the media, although these, of course, were important. It was also the fact that the media themselves were going through a major transformation in how they regarded and marketed to their audiences that heightened, dramatically, the conditions in the images and messages they produced. Radio, TV, magazines, popular music, film- these were the mass

media, predicated on the notion of a national unified market, and their raison d'être was to reach

as many people as possible . (Douglas, 1994: 14) Douglas continues on the impact of the media in women's life during the 1950's, as feminine magazines were producing a new market segment: teenage girls. The media gave young women a sense of identity as a distinct group and thus a form of power: A sense of entitlement, and a sense of generational power [...] At the same time that the makers of Pixie Bands, Maybeline eyeliner, Breck shampoo, and Beach Blanket Bingo reinforced our roles as cute, airheaded girls, the mass media produced a teen girl popular culture of songs, movies, TV shows, and magazines that cultivated in us a highly self-conscious sense of importance, difference and even rebellion. Because young women became critically important economically, as a market, the suspicion began to percolate among them, over time, that they might be important culturally, and then politically, as a generation . (Douglas, 1994: 14) The mass media's presentations of] middle-class, sexually repressed, white-bread norms and values there emerged a subculture, partly but not wholly led by young people, that included rock'n' roll, FM radio, 'beat' poetry and literature, and foreign films . (Douglas, 1994: 15) N. Walker points out the importance of feminine magazines in the construction of a national definition on women's role in society and to solidify middle-class standards: 24
Although the magazines thus played a role in the creation of the domestic world well before

1940, the political need for a new American self-definition and a rising standard of living made

this role both more insistent and more vexed after that point. A survey of the magazines' contents from 1940 until the late 1950's shows both an expanding definition of the domestic -to include national holydays and psychological adjustment- and an increased emphasis on the possibility of improvement in all areas of life. (Walker, 2000: 31) One can wonder why these magazines were so important and so largely present in women's lives during the first decades of the twentieth century. This can be attributed to several factors: the first one was the increased "professionalization" of the housework and the creation of a "domestic science" by the application of scientific principles to the duties of the housework with "efficiency" as the main purpose. Comparing home chores and industrial production was a way to assure women that they too could benefit in their jobs from the developments in science and technology. A second cause was the availability of products that should have facilitated the housewife's burden but didn't. As Helen Damon-Moore affirms in Magazines for the Millions: As stoves replaced open fireplaces and products like flour were commercially produced, diets became more varied and cooking more complicated; as fabric was produced outside the home and paper patterns were made available for home use, wardrobes became more elaborated. (Damon-Moore, 1994: 22) Damon-Moore notes a third phenomenon that increased women's need for magazine's advice and assistance: a decline in the mother-daughter tutoring relation that resulted in a larger gap between the experiences of one generation and another. Differences of minds and lifestyle led women to find new sources of advice and information in the printed homemaking literature. In his introduction to the 1960 Good Housekeeping Treasury, Donald Elder affirms that many adult readers of women's magazines were first introduced to these publications during childhood, not only because the magazines had features designed for a younger public, but also because it was a way to show young people what life could and should be: "a whole fascinating world of fiction, illustrations, cover paintings, advertisements with pictures of houses, appetizing food, intriguing gadgets, far-off-places, healthy 25
babies in great numbers - there is hardly any childhood world comparable to it except that of mail-order catalogue or a well-stocked attic" (13). He also suggests an interesting fusion of the past and future: "the well-stocked attic" representing what had been saved by previous generations and the "mail-order catalog offered consumer goods for tomorrow. In a very authentic way, women's magazines offered both a nostalgia for the past and a hope for the future. The perception of thequotesdbs_dbs47.pdfusesText_47

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